Summer Next Gen Designers Camp 2018

For Summer 2018, we have created four advanced project weeks for students 4th through 8th grade. Depending on the center, our older students can choose between between our Next Gen Designers Camp and our Innovators Camp. Students who are not entering 4th grade in the Fall of 2018 are not eligible for this camp, but are welcome to register in our Innovator's Camp occurring simultaneously for kids up to age 12.

Remote Controlled Cars (Offered at Solo and Wheaton centers. Dates vary by location) – Cars are such a big part of our lives from taking us to school to transporting our food to the grocery store. In this NexGen Design Camp built for 4th-8th graders, students will learn engineering design and electronic control. This is all new project design camp, where we are going to make real remote controlled cars with motors powering the wheels, steering, and an actual remote control. Remote control cars are cool, but making your own with a custom designed body is next level cool. This camp will feature kids using real power tools, cutting, sanding raw materials, painting, and engineering solutions to innovate the cars with features that students desire. On Day 5 of camp we will test the cars on a KSL racetrack to better understand design trade offs and see in real time the rewards of their creativity and hard work.

Boat Design and Innovation (Offered at Wheaton and Seattle centers. Dates vary by location) - Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans spark the creative design juices for even the most video game loving children among us. Living along the water in both Chicago and Seattle, offers students at Kids Science Labs the opportunity to engage in an engineering challenge for the ages, as our 4th-8th grade students will design real boats using real science under real engineering constraints all week and take home their innovative designs that will fit in the bathtub. Our NexGen Boat Design Camp in 2018 will feature kids using real power tools, cutting and sanding raw materials, and experimenting with buoyancy, liquid properties of materials, propulsion techniques, weatherproofing, stability, and even cabin design, as they consider the design tradeoffs that will allow each of them to design, build, innovate, and test their boats. Kids will chose from different boat types (sailboats, speedboats), and design their boats from beginning to end with no kits whatsoever. This NexGen Design Camp was made to introduce kids to the real tradeoffs in design that happen, including economics. We have tweaked these Boat Designs such that they are scaled to fit inside of your bathtub (bigger than a toy boat, but small enough for a 12yr old to carry easily).

Design/Build a Net Zero Energy Green Home (Offered at our Seattle Center) –Architecture, Design, and Engineering will come together for our innovators, who will create their own Sustainable Green Home from various materials. We will problem solve and practice design thinking as we create homes with working water, electricity, and recycled systems in 1/12 scaled homes to make the world a better place through smart sustainable design. Creativity will be front and center as we integrate solar & wind power, understand permeability, structure, and what's inside all those walls. Students will desire their own home and then construct it with real tools to better understand design trade-offs and uncover new solutions to assembly, heat transfer, and how homes can be efficient and a place we love to be.

Bioengineering, Medicine & Robotic Arm Design (Offered at our South Loop Center) - Our kids will design our future, so for this innovation busting NexGen Design Camp, we will explore the engineering design of bionics, bioengineering, and sports medicine. If your child is into medicine, mechanics, or robotics, then they will get a blast in this camp that will result in the design of a functional bioengineered mechanical arm that they can control. Each day kids will receive a modern medical marvel that will challenge their critical thinking, as we work through the physics of how robotics can be applied to medicine. This all new NexGen Design Camp for 4th-8th graders only, and will include at least one major dissection to go along with working with real tools to design their mechanical robotic arm. The class will NOT focus on the electronics, but rather the associated bionics and physics that help connect to our human physiology. Any students that are not at least in 4th grade, will automatically be re-enrolled in our Innovator’s Camp.

Why are you adding these weeks of design and project camp? We are always tinkering and want to create new, fun, and challenging material for our students. Parents have requested we offer a project based progressive camp for older students at KSL. In response to those requests, we have created our Next Gen Designers Camp which we will initially be offering to 4th to 8th graders. There will be two major design projects where our students Design, Build, and Test their creations. Students can freely choose between our Next Gen Designers Camp and our regularly offered Innovators camp offered for the entire summer.

If you would like to know more about our other camps, please Innovators camp.